Crushing, eviscerating any shred of humanity. A hopeless wall of sound for a time-dilating 84 minutes.

FAVORITE TRACKS: “A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut”; “Bloodhail”; “Holy Fucking Shit: 40,000”; “Earthmover”

Viscerally haunting and unsettling throughout: a window into a darkened soul.

FAVORITE TRACKS: “Blackest Bile”; “No One Is Ever Going to Want Me”

An unbelievably fantastic, entrancing spiritual jazz suite.

FAVORITE TRACKS: “The Creator Has a Master Plan”

If you told me this album’s title track was the greatest prog song of all time, I’d believe you. Unfortunately, this album gets slightly weaker in the second half.

FAVORITE TRACKS: “Close to the Edge”

Construção is easily one of the best songs ever made. It slowly progresses into madness, symbolizing the brutal dictatorial regime against which it protests.

My dad recommended me this. It’s definitely a great funk-rock album, but the second half slows down considerably and becomes more “songs” than “funk songs.”

FAVORITE TRACKS: “Ghost”; “Guyute”; “Limb by Limb”; “Wading in the Velvet Sea”

This album is fantastic, but compared to Illinois, I mean, it’s not even close.

Although the electronic textures on this are very pleasant and really cool at some points, I feel like the almost (and I hate to use this word) “pretentious” dissonance at some points kind of detracts from Sufjan’s pure harmonic genius that he showcases so well on Illinois.

Removed from Illinois, however, this is still a phenomenal album.

FAVORITE TRACKS: “Too Much”; “Age ... read more

This song is so great and wonderful and radical and stuff. People are underrating this HARD.

Are you kidding me? This might be the best album I’ve ever heard.

It’s hard to describe how perfectly “up my alley” this is. Every single song sounds exactly how I wish it sounded, if that makes sense. Absolutely incredible, and practically perfection both sonically and in terms of composition.

FAVORITE TRACKS: “ Concerning the UFO Sighting Near Highland, Illinois”; “Come On! Feel the Illinoise!”; “John Wayne Gacy, Jr.”; ... read more

Has some great songs, super influential, but as an album it really isn’t that good.

FAVORITE TRACKS: Sky, New Tank, Stop Breathing

Hypnotic.

FAVORITE TRACKS: Dead Flag Blues, East Hastings, Providence

Fantastic and enrapturing. It basically turns into a maximalist cover of David Bowie’s “‘Heroes’” for the last couple minutes.

Listening to this, it's almost jarring how immense its influence over all the jazz that came after it is.

Absolutely beautiful and completely enveloping.

A hauntingly beautiful document of Nick Drake's incredible talent in intimate, touching songwriting.

Definitely top 5 greatest live performances of all time, but I have a hard time deciding between this, Stop Making Sense and any given Swans performance.

OH MY GOD. HOLY SHIT. THIS ALBUM MAKES ME WANT TO MOOOOOOOVE

This version is also the definitive version of this performance. The cut version is missing so many of the best songs in the original film.

FAVORITE TRACKS: Making Flippy Floppy, the last seven tracks (best 7-track run ever???)

An absolutely phenomenal IDM album, perfect for driving at night. I’m just not blown away for its entire runtime.

FAVORITE TRACKS: “Open Eye Signal,” “Immunity”

Decent project overall, but "Goodbye, Goodbye" has got to be one of the most beautiful songs ever created.

Deserves Record & Song of the Year imo.